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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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My session was the first in the morning, at 8:30am, but managed to pack the room full of people. A few looklike they just rolled in from Brocade's special get-together in Casey's Irish Pub the night before.I presented how IBM's storage strategy for the information infrastructure fits into the greater corporate-wide themes.To liven things up, I gave out copies of my book[Inside System Storage: Volume I] to those who asked or answered the toughest questions.

Data Deduplication and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)

IBM Toby Marek compared and contrasted the various data deduplication technologies and products available, andhow to deploy them as the repository for TSM workloads. She is a software engineer for our TSM software product,and gave a fair comparison between IBM System Storage N series Advanced Single Instance Storage (A-SIS), IBMDiligent, and other solutions out in the marketplace.If you are going to combine technologies, then it isbest to dedupe first, then compress, and finally encrypt the data. She also explained about the many cleverways that TSM does data reduction at the client side greatly reduces the bandwidth traffic over the LAN,as well as reducing disk and tape resources for storage. This includes progressive "incremental forever" backup for file selection, incremental backups for databases, and adaptive sub-file backup.Because of these data reduction techniques, you may not get as much benefit as deduplication vendors claim.

The Business Value of Energy Efficiency Data Centers

Scott Barielle did a great job presenting the issues related to the Green IT data center. He is part of IBM"STG Lab Services" team that does energy efficiency studies for customers. It is not unusual for his teamto find potential savings of up to 80 percent of the Watts consumed in a client's data center.

IBM has done a lot to make its products more energy efficient. For example, in the United States, most datacenters are supplied three-phase 480V AC current, but this is often stepped down to 208V or 110V with powerdistribution units (PDUs). IBM's equipment allows for direct connection to this 480V, eliminating the step-downloss. This is available for the IBM System z mainframe, the IBM System Storage DS8000disk system, and larger full-frame models of our POWER-based servers, and will probably be rolled out to someof our other offerings later this year. The end result saves 8 to 14 percent in energy costs.

Scott had some interesting statistics. Typical US data centers only spend about 9 percent of their IT budgeton power and cooling costs. The majority of clients that engage IBM for an energy efficiency study are not tryingto reduce their operational expenditures (OPEX), but have run out, or close to running out, of total kW ratingof their current facility, and have been turned down by their upper management to spend the average $20 million USDneeded to build a new one. The cost of electricity in the USA has risen very slowly over the past 35 years, andis more tied the to fluctuations of Natural Gas than it is to Oil prices.(a recent article in the Dallas News confirmed this:["As electricity rates go up, natural gas' high prices, deregulation blamed"])

Mike Biere, author of the book [BusinessIntelligence for the Enterprise], presented Cognos v8 and how it is being deployed for the IBMSystem z mainframe. Typically, customers do their BI processing on distributed systems, but 70 percent of the world's business data is on mainframes, so it makes sense to do yourBI there as well. Cognos v8 runs on Linux for System z, connecting to z/OS via [Hypersockets].

There are a variety of other BI applications on the mainframe already, including DataQuant,AlphaBlox, IBI WebFocus and SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence. In addition to accessing traditional onlinetransaction processing (OLTP) repositories like DB2, IMS and VSAM, using the [IBM WebSphere ClassicFederation Server], Cognos v8 can also read Lotus databases.

Business Intelligence is traditionally query, reporting and online analytics process (OLAP) for the top 10 to 15 percent of the company, mostly executives andanalysts, for activities like business planning, budgeting and forecasting. Cognos PowerPlay stores numericaldata in an [OLAP cube] for faster processing.OLAP cubes are typically constructed with a batch cycle, using either "Extract, Transfer, Load" [ETL], or "Change Data Capture" [CDC], which playsto the strength of IBM System z mainframe batch processing capabilities.If you are not familiar with OLAP, Nigel Pendse has an article[What is OLAP?] for background information.

Over the past five years, BI is now being more andmore deployed for the rest of the company, knowledge workers tasked with doing day-to-day operations. Thisphenomenom is being called "Operational" Business Intelligence.

IBM Glen Corneau, who is on the Advanced Technical Support team for AIX and System p, presented the IBMGeneral Parellel File System (GPFS), which is available for AIX, Linux-x86 and Linux on POWER.Unfortunately, many of the questions were related to Scale Out File Services (SOFS), which my colleague GlennHechler was presenting in another room during this same time slot.

GPFS is now in its 11th release since its introducing in 1997. All of the IBM supercomputers on the [Top 500 list] use GPFS. The largest deployment of GPFS is 2241 nodes.A GPFS environment can support up to 256 file systems, each file system can have up to 2 billion filesacross 2 PB of storage. GPFS supports "Direct I/O" making it a great candidate for Oracle RAC deployments.Oracle 10g automatically detects if it is using GPFS, and sets the appropriate DIO bits in the stream totake advantage of GPFS features.

Glen also covered the many new features of GPFS, such as the ability to place data on different tiers ofstorage, with policies to move to lower tiers of storage, or delete after a certain time period, all conceptswe call Information Lifecycle Management. GPFS also supports access across multiple locations and offersa variety of choices for disaster recovery (DR) data replication.

Perhaps the only problem with conferences like this is that it can be an overwhelming["fire hose"] of information!

This week I'm in Los Angeles for the Systems Technology Conference (STC '08).We have over 1900 IT professionals attending, of which 1200 IBMers from North America, Latin America,and Asia Pacific regions, as well as another 350 IBM Business Partners. The rest, including me, are world wideor from other areas.

Last January, IBM reorganized its team to be more client-focused. Instead of focused on products, we are nowclient-centric, and have teams to cover our large enterprise systems through direct sales force, business systemsfor sales through our channel business partners, and industry systems for specific areas like deep computing,digital surveillance and retail systems solutions.

In addition to 788 sessions to attend these next four days, we had a few main tent sessions.My third line (my boss' boss' boss) David Gelardi presented Enterprise Systems. This is the group I am in.

Akemi Watanabe presented for Business Systems. Her native language is Japanese, so to do an entire talk inEnglish was quite impressive. Her focus is on SMB accounts, those customers with less than 1000 employeesthat are looking for easy-to-use solutions. She mentioned IBM's new [Blue Business Platform] which includesLotus Foundation Start, an Application Integration Toolkit, and the Global Application Marketplace.

Part of this process is the merger of System p and System i into "POWER" systems, and then offering both midrangeand enterprise versions of these that run AIX, i5/OS and Linux on POWER. It turns out that only 9 percent of ourSystem i customers are only on this platform. Another 87 percent have Windows, so it makes sense to offer i5/OSon BladeCenter, to consolidate Windows servers from HP, Dell or Sun over to IBM.

Meanwhile, IBM's strategy to support Linux has proven successful. 25 percent of x86 servers now run Linux. IBMhas 600 full-time developers for Linux, over 500 of which contributed to the latest 2.6 kernel development. Our ["chiphopper"] program has successfullyported over 900 applications. There are now over 6500 applications that run on Linux applications, on our strategic alliances with Red Hat (RHEL) and Novell (SUSE) distributions of Linux.

Her recommendation to SMB reps: learn POWER systems, BladeCenter, and Linux. I agree!

IBM is focused on "real-world-aware" applications, which includes traffic, crime, surveillance, fraud, andRFID enablement. These are streams of data that happen real-time, that need to be dealt with now, not later.

Most people know that IBM has the majority of the top 500 supercomputers, but few may not realize that IBMalso has delivered solutions to the top 100 green companies. IBM success is explained in more detail in this[Press Release].

The group split up to four different platform meetings: Storage, Modular, Power, and Mainframe. Barry Rudolphpresented for the Storage platform. He talked about the explosion in information, business opportunities,risk and cost management. IBM has shifted from being product-focused, to the stack of servers and storage,to our latest focus on solutions across the infrastructure. He mentioned our DARPA win for [PERCS] which stands for productive,easy-to-use, reliable computing system.

My theme this week was to focus on "Do-it-Yourself" solutions, such as the "open storage" concept presentedby Sun Microsystems, but it has morphed into a discussion on vendor lock-in. Both deserve a bit of furtherexploration.

There were several reasons offered on why someone might pursue a "Do-it-Yourself" course of action.

Building up skills

In my post [Simply Dinners and Open Storage], I suggested that building a server-as-storage solution based on Sun's OpenSolaris operating system could serve to learn more about [OpenSolaris], and by extension, the Solaris operating system.Like Linux, OpenSolaris is open source and has distributions that run on a variety of chipsets, from Sun's ownSPARC, to commodity x86 and x86-64 hardware. And as I mentioned in my post [Getting off the island], a version of OpenSolaris was even shown to run successfully on the IBM System z mainframe.

"Learning by Doing" is a strong part of the [Constructivism] movement in education. TheOne Laptop Per Child [OLPC] uses this approach. IBM volunteers in Tucson and 40other sites [help young students build robots]constructed from [Lego Mindstorms]building blocks.Edward De Bono uses the term [operacy] to refer to the"skills of doing", preferred over just "knowing" facts and figures.

However, I feel OpenSolaris is late to the game. Linux, Windows and MacOS are all well-established x86-based operating systems that most home office/small office users would be familiar with, and OpenSolaris is positioning itself as "the fourth choice".

Familiarity

In my post[WashingtonGets e-Discovery Wakeup Call], I suggested that the primary motivation for the White House to switch from Lotus Notes over to Microsoft Outlookwas familiarity with Microsoft's offerings. Unfortunately, that also meant abandoning a fully-operational automated email archive system, fora manual do-it-yourself approach copying PST files from journal folders.

Familiarity also explains why other government employees might print out their emails and archive them on paperin filing cabinets. They are familiar with this process, it allows them to treat email in the same manner as they have treated paper documents in the past.

Cost, Control and Unique Requirements

The last category of reasons can often result if what you want is smaller or bigger than what is availablecommercially. There are minimum entry-points for many vendors. If you want something so small that it is notprofitable, you may end up doing it yourself. On the other end of the scale, both Yahoo and Google ended up building their data centers with a do-it-yourself approach, because no commercial solutions were available atthe time. (IBM now offers [iDataPlex], so that has changed!)

While you could hire a vendor to build a customized solution to meet your unique requirements, it might turn outto be less costly to do-it-yourself. This might also provide some added control over the technologies and components employed. However, as EMC blogger Chuck Hollis correctly pointed out for[Do-it-yourself storage],your solution may not be less costly than existingoff-the-shelf solutions from existing storage vendors, when you factor in scalability and support costs.

Of course, this all assumes that storage admins building the do-it-yourself storage have enough spare time to do so. When was the last time your storage admins had spare time of any kind?Will your storage admins provide the 24x7 support you could get from established storage vendors? Will theybe able to fix the problem fast enough to keep your business running?

From this, I would gather that if you have storage admins more familiar with Solaris than Linux, Windows or MacOS,and select commodity x86 servers from IBM, Sun, HP, or Dell, they could build a solution that has less vendor lock-in than something off-the-shelf from Sun. Let's explore the fears of vendor lock-in further.

The storage vendor goes out of business

Sun has not been doing so well, so perhaps "open storage" was a way to warn existing Sun storage customers thatbuilding your own may be the next alternative.The New York Times title of their article says it all:["Sun Microsystems Posts Loss and Plans to Reduce Jobs"]. Sun is a big company, so I don't expect them to close their doors entirely this year,but certainly fear of being locked-in to any storage vendor's solution gets worse if you fear the vendor might go out of business.

The storage vendor will get acquired by a vendor you don't like

We've seen this before. You don't like vendor A, so you buy kit from vendor B, only to have vendor A acquire vendorB after your purchase. Surprise!

The storage vendor will not support new applications, operating systems, or other new equipment

Here the fear is that the decisions you make today might prevent you from choices you want to make in the future.You might want to upgrade to the latest level of your operating system, but your storage vendor doesn't supportit yet. Or maybe you want to upgrade your SAN to a faster bandwidth speed, like 8 Gbps, but your storage vendordoesn't support it yet. Or perhaps that change would require re-writing lots of scripts using the existingcommand line interfaces (CLI). Or perhaps your admins would require new training for the new configuration.

The storage vendor will raise prices or charge you more than you expect on follow-on upgrades

For most monolithic storage arrays, adding additional disk capacity means buying it from the same vendor as the controller. I heard of one company recently who tried to order entry-level disk expansion drawer, at a lower price, solely to move the individual disk drives into a higher-end disk system. Guess what? It didn't work. Most storage vendors would not support such mixed configurations.

If you are going to purchase additional storage capacity to an existing disk system, it should cost no more thanthe capacity price rate of your original purchase. IBM offers upgrades at the going market rate, but not all competitors are this nice. Some take advantage of the vendor lock-in, charging more for upgrades and pocketing the difference as profit.

Vendor lock-in represents the obstacles in switching vendors in the event the vendor goes out of business, failsto support new software or hardware in the data center, or charges more than you are comfortable with. These obstacles can make it difficult to switch storage vendors, upgrade your applications, or meet otherbusiness obligations. IBM SANVolume Controller and TotalStorage Productivity Center can help reduce or eliminate many of these concerns. IBMGlobal Services can help you, as much or as little, as you want in this transformation. Here are the four levelsof the do-it-yourself continuum:

Let me figure it out myself

Tell me what to do

Help me do it

Do it for me

This is the self-service approach. Go to our website, download an [IBM Redbook], figure out whatyou need, and order the parts to do-it-yourself.

IBM Global Business Services can help understand your business requirementsand tell you what you need to meet them.

IBM Global Technology Services can help design, assemble and deploy asolution, working with your staff to ensure skill and knowledge transfer.

And, it's not too late to sign up for IBM Tivoli's [Pulse 2008] conference that will be heldin Orlando, Florida, May 18-22, 2008. I'll be there Sunday and Monday only, in the Tivoli Storage track, so if you are planning to attend and wish to meet up with me while I am there, please send me a note!

My colleague, Marissa Benekos, is on location with her video camera in Orlando, Florida for theComputerWorld [Storage Networking World] conference.

The IT specialists from the IBM booth were excited at David Bricker's debut on YouTube.Here's the rest of the gang in this [video].

Here's Andy Monshaw, General Manager of IBM System Storage and keynote speaker at this SNW event, summarizingIBM's "Information Infrastructure" strategy in 60 seconds in this [Youtube video].

This last video is Clod Barrera talking about the importance of security. Clod is an IBM Distinguished Engineerand Chief Technical Strategist for IBM System Storage product line. Here is his[Youtube video]

It looks like Marissa is having a lot of fun taking these videos at the event.More videos, as we get them, will be posted to the [IBM videos channel].

On StorageZilla, fellow blogger Mark Twomey introduces the latest entrant from EMC to the blogosphere,in his post [Polly Pearson's blog].

Although we share the same name, with the same exact spelling, I would like be the first to point out we are not related, at least as far as I know. Basing solely from her post[Welcome to my Blog - Part 1], sheis a year younger than I am, a lot better looking, majored in communications, and is not afraid to quit acrappy job for a much better job elsewhere. I on the other hand, majored in engineering, but agree wholeheartedly not to stick in a crappy situation. There is such a skills shortage out there in the IT industry,with a cap on U.S. [H-1B visas] at a paltry [65,000 this year]. If you don't like your IT job, you should be able toquit and find another one in the IT industry you are more passionate about.

On a similar theme, over at DrunkenData, Jon Toigo's latest post asks if you are[Feeling Insecure About Your Job?]ScoreLogix’s Job Security Index has fallen in the United States, with a sharp drop specifically for IT jobs. Jon points out that while it might be easy to point out that a number went up or down, it is far more difficultto explain why it did so. He gives a good piece of career advice:

Want to keep your job? Play by the rules of the front office: demonstrate the value of what you do for the company from the standpoint of cost-savings, risk reduction and process improvement. Make yourself indispensable. If they don’t appreciate you then, you need to move on. You will always be hiding in your cubical and sweating a pink slip ...

So shine bright. Be remarkable. It is not always easy to communicate your value in a technical position to cluelessnon-technical managers. Certainly, writing a blog helps. Within IBM, there are over 3500 bloggers. Most postwithin the safe confines behind the firewall, but manage to generate ideas, present valid arguments, and get theconversation rolling with the right set of people that might be difficult otherwise in a company like IBM of over350,000 employees scattered around the world. A few of us daringly blog in full public, and carry the conversationto our clients, prospects, analysts, journalists, Business Partners, and others within the IT industry.

So, Polly Pearson from EMC, although we have never met in person, I too welcome you to the blogosphere!

Tim Ferris started the festivities with [The Grand Illusion: The Real Tim Ferriss speaks]. He claimed that for the past year, he outsourced the writing of his blog to a writer from India, and an editor from the Philippines. Given that his post was dated March 31, and he writes frequently about the benefits of outsourcing, it appeared like a legitimate post. However, Tim fessed up the following day, claiming that it was April 1 in Japan where he wrote it.

Guy Kawasaki wrote[April Fools' Stories You Shouldn't Believe]including my favorite #12 "Ruby on Rails cited Twitter as the centerpiece of its new 'Rails Can Scale' marketing program." Speaking of Twitter, Fellow IBM blogger Alan Lepofsky from our Lotus Notes team wrote[Great, now there is Twitter Spam]. It looked like a real post, but then I realized, ... everything on Twitter is spam!

Topics like energy consumption and global warming were fodder for posts and pranks.The post[Was Earth Hour a joke again?], argued thatthe preparation of "Earth Hour" last week in effect used up more energy than the hour of this annual "lights-off event" actually saved. This reminded me of John Tierney's piece in the New York Times ["How virtuous is Ed Begley, Jr.?"] where a scientist explains that it is more "green" for the environment to drive a car short distances than to walk:

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

Wayan Vota, my buddy over at OLPCnews, writes in his post[Windows XO Child Centric Development] that the "Sugar" operating environment on the innovative Linux-based XO laptops will soon be re-named the"Windows XO Operating System", with their new motto "Windows XO: A Child-Centric Operating Platform for Learning, Expression and Exploration." The mocked up photo of an XO laptop with the Windows XO logo was excellent!

The economists from Freakonomics explain in [And While You're at it, Toss the Nickel] that it costs the US Government 1.7 cents to produce each penny. The US government loses $50 million dollars each year making pennies. Each nickel costs 10 cents to produce. This one was dated March 31, so it could actually be true. Sad, but true.

What the de-dupe team found is that there is a hidden feature within recent generations of this chip that allow a single bit, under certain circumstances, to represent TWO bits of information.

Still, almost 34% of the total bits transferred were in fact aligned double-zeros, far more than all other bit combinations - and most importantly, these were quite frequently byte-aligned, as required by this new-found capability. Makes sense, if you think about it - most of those 32- and 64-bit integers are used to store numbers that are relatively small (years, months, days, credit charges, account balances, etc.). So that's why the team decided to use this new two-fer bit to represent "00".

Mathematically, if you can transmit 34% of the data using half as many bits, you reduce the number of bits you have to transfer in total by 17%. Which, while not necessarily earth-shattering, is nothing to be ashamed of. On top of the SRDF performance enhancements delivered in 5772 (30% reduction in latency or 2x the distance), this new enhancement adds another 17% latency improvement (or ~1.4x more distance at the same latency). Combined with 5772, SRDF/S customers could see a 50% reduction in latency. And 5773 allows SRDF/A cycle times to be set below 5 seconds (with RPQ) - this new feature adds a little headroom to maximize bandwidth efficiency for the shortest possible RPO.

Again, this looked real, until I did the math. Start with the speed of light in a vacuum of space ("c" in BarryB's title) which is roughly 300,000 kilometers per second, or put into more understandable units, 300 kilometers per millisecond. However, light travels slower through all other materials, and for fiber optic glass it is only 200 kilometers per millisecond. Sending a block of data across 100km, and then getting a response back that it arrived safely, is a total round-trip distance of 200km, so roughly 1 millisecond. However, EMC SRDF often takes two or three round-trips per write, versus IBM Metro Mirror on the IBM System Storage DS8000 which has got this down to a single round-trip. The number of round-trips has a much bigger effect on latency than EMC's double-bit data compression technique. With IBM, you only experience about 1 millisecond latency per write for every 100km distance between locations, the shortest latency in the industry.

It is good that once a year, you should be skeptical of what you read in the blogosphere, and sometimes check the facts!

IBM Developerworks that host this blog suggest posting once per day. General blogging guidelines I have found suggest 300 to 500 words per post. Most magazine and newspaper articles range around 700 words.In my book, [Inside System Storage: Volume I], I had 165 posts covering twelve months, with an average of 636 words per post.

longer posts, perhaps once a week or less

I've seen several executives adopt this approach. When they have something to say, out comes a long speech,in written form, when the occasion deems it necessary. Some of the more technical blogs adopt this approachalso, going into great detail on product specifications and supporting material to make their case.

Either way, it comes out to perhaps 2000 words per week, that can be 20 posts of 100 words each, four posts that are 500 words each, or one long post for the week. Currently, I post about 2-5 times per week, with posts 500-700 words long. I can try to mix short posts with long ones, to give you readers some variety. Post a comment below on whether you prefer that I do more/shorter or fewer/longer.

As for the future of IT...

In a recent post by fellow blogger (and author) Nick Carr titled [Alan Turing, cloud computing and IT's future], he mentions he has a free download of a 7-page PDF called "IT in 2018: from Turing's machine to the computing cloud." It's a quick read, covering many of thepoints in his most recent book, The Big Switch. Here's an excerpt:

As for computer professionals, the coming of the WorldWide Computer means a realignment of the IT workforce,with some jobs disappearing, some shifting fromusers to suppliers, and others becoming more prominent.On the supplier side, we’ll likely see booming demand for the skills required to design and run reliable,large-scale computing plants. Expertise in parallelprocessing, virtualization, artificial intelligence, energymanagement and cooling, encryption, high-speed networking,and related fields will be coveted and rewarded.Much software will also need to be written orrewritten to run efficiently on the new infrastructure. Ina clear sign of the new labor requirements, Google andIBM have teamed up to spearhead a major educationinitiative aimed at training university students to writeprograms for massively parallel systems.

Some interesting insights from Google can be read in New York Times'Freakonomics blog, where Steve Dubner interviews Google's chief economist: [Hal Varian Answers Your Questions]Hal comes up with some clever answers to some rather tough questions. It's worth a read.

It is good to have futurists like this. However, as we caution in IBM, those who seek a life througha crystal ball... must often settle for a diet of broken glass.I will close with one of my favorite quotes.

"As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed."--- William Gibson (science-fiction author)

So, yes, I may sometimes look at the rear-view mirror. However, there is a common theme from Nick Carr to Steve Dubnerto William Gibson. They also look back to the past to give insights on how things might unfold in the future.

My view is that for some the future is already here. IBM already offers the product, service or solutionthat might be just what you need, but you just haven't gotten it yet. Future for you, but past for us.For others, the future is repeating a pattern we have already seen in the past. Understanding what happened back then helps us be better prepared to understand what is happening now, in the directions and trends we forecast moving forward.

Last year, in my post [Inaugural Brand Impact 2007 Awards], I mentioned how IBM beat out other major storage vendors for the best brand "IBM System Storage". I am proud of this, and highlighted it as one of my team's key accomplishments during my brief20-month career in marketing, which I recapped in my post[Switching Over from What and Why] when I switched over to consulting.

This year, IBM did it again. For a second consecutive year, IBM System Storage was recognized by [Liquid Agency]as the leading brand for enterprise storage. Here is an excerpt from the [IBM Press Release]:

"IBM System Storage is the most trusted storage portfolio in the world, providing our clients leading disk, tape and storage software solutions and services. This award reflects IBM's priority in delivering information infrastructure solutions to solve our client's most critical storage challenges," said Barry Rudolph, Vice President, IBM System Storage. "We are helping clients -- from large corporations to small businesses -- intelligently manage information as a strategic business asset. We are proud to be recognized as the clear market leader in delivering solutions that help our clients manage and extract value from their information."

Liquid Agency reviewed over 250 technology brands to make this assessment.

The Business/IT Alignment category is critical for many companies; getting these two key divisions in sync provides a huge competitive advantage. This year’s winner – by a landslide – is IBM's [Innov8].

This Big Blue product has a touch of the sci-fi to it: it’s an interactive, 3-D business simulator intended to close the divide between IT staff and business executives. In other words, it’s…a video game. I guarantee you that in all the decades that Datamation has done its Product of the Year awards, never has a video game won. The times they are a-changin’.

Whether a server is the “best” server is, in truth, based on your company’s individual needs and budgets. In the server world, with its myriad options and add-ons, one size definitely does not fit all. That said, IBM p 570 Server must fit plenty of needs; the box easily won the Enterprise Server category. IBM claims this workhorse doubles the speed of its predecessor without requiring a larger energy footprint.

IBM Lotus Symphony

When it comes to total numbers of users, there’s no question that Microsoft Office is the 800-pound gorilla of this category. The deeply entrenched Office makes the corporate world go ‘round. Given Office’s status, it’s a major eyebrow raiser that this category was won by relative newcomer IBM Lotus Symphony. Perhaps it’s because Big Blue’s product is free (that always helps), or because IBM is itself such an established vendor. Whatever the case, consider this vote as a huge upset.

(Note: IBM Lotus Symphony is available for [free download] for Windows and Linux.When my friend purchased a new laptop that came pre-installed with Windows Vista, he was surprised to see that Microsoft Office was not included. I pointed him to Lotus Symphony, and he is running great with his existing Word, Powerpoint and Excel documents! I use Lotus Symphony on both Windows and Linux, and IBM plans to make a version available for Mac OS X-- when that happens, I have my Mac Mini G4 waiting to try it out.)

IBM Wireless Software for Business Intelligence (BI) on the go

For most of 2007, IBM Cognos 8 Go! Mobile software supported only Blackberry units. At the end of last year, Cognos upgraded its wireless business intelligence software – which delivers business reports to on-the-go staffers – to support handhelds that run Windows Mobile OS. Naturally, this expanded the company’s user base, and likely helped Cognos 8 Go! Mobile win the Wireless Software category.

(If you have a RIM Blackberry handheld device, you can try out this[actual demo].)

Wow! That's a lot of awards. Congratulations to all my IBM colleagues who made this happen!